Devilish Young Firecrackers
by LetThemRot
Summary: The latest installment in the Shurley!verse - Dean talks everyone into going camping, Gabriel brings the marshmallows, and Balthazar reserves the right to be a complete and utter ass. Sabriel, Destiel, and Jothazar Jo/Balthazar


For the record, the whole trip was Dean's idea.

All of it. The date (Fourth of July weekend), the location (Bumfuck Nowhere, Texas), the equipment (standard, low-budget camping gear, with an amount of alcohol equal in mass to everything else combined – including the vehicles), and even the goddamn music selection (Metallica and AC/DC, played loud enough to make ears bleed and rub vocal chords raw after the first hour). Given the chance, he probably would've established a dress code on top of everything else, and then it would have been Jo's civic duty to deliver a swift knee to his nether regions, for the sake of everyone involved.

She already has enough on her plate in regular life, what with keeping Balthazar in line and intact – a full-time job all by itself. Now she has to look after him _and_ Dean _and_ Cas _and_ Sam _and_ Gabriel, all out in the middle of a forest in northern Texas, for _two days_, because Castiel had the bad judgment to mention that he'd never been camping, and Dean found that abhorrent. And then Gabe declared himself chaperone, which of course meant that Sam had to go as well, because God forbid they spend more than ten minutes apart. Then, because Balthazar was in the room, he insisted on tagging along. And if he really thought Jo was going to let him go off and spend a weekend harassing _her _friends all by himself, he had another thing coming.

Sometimes, she thinks the man must be an idiot. When he drinks too much and taunts the cops until they get fed up and she has to go down to the police station to bring him home just as the sun is starting to rise. When he kisses her in full view of her mother, who glares at him like she wants his head on a pike. When he goes in to standoffs against his uncle and senior cousins and acts like he's going to come away feeling like anything besides a wretched failure. He's forty-nine years old – should know better than to do any of that by now.

They've been together for two and a half years, and at least once every six months, she has to tell him that she doesn't know who's stupider: him, or her, for staying with him.

But occasionally she doesn't feel like such a horrendous fool for being here. Those nights when she comes back from a long shift at the Roadhouse to find a new set of throwing knives waiting by her door, for example. Or that time he talked her through her nerves and walked her to her SAT (because who takes the SAT – who the fuck _applies to college – _at thirty-two years old?) and kissed her outside the testing room and promised she'd get through it on sheer willpower alone if she had to, because he knew her; he knew she could. And she did.

Or there're moments like this one, when Balthazar has managed to both sit down _and _close his mouth for an extended period of time. He's not even asleep.

The bonfire flares brighter as one of the central logs collapses with a grumbling roar and rush of sparks. Across the flames, Castiel scoots a little closer to Dean, huddling down under the blanket that they're sharing. This summer has been a chilly one, especially in the Midwest, and the weather forecast before they left predicted that temperatures would drop into the low fifties tonight. Nothing life-threatening – "just a nip in the air," as Balthazar put it, enough to make Jo grateful for the fire.

Gabriel has been gone for several minutes now, after giving the flames a string of speculative looks and muttering something disjointed about walking distances and rabid raccoons. Now the the crunch of careful footsteps wending their way back through the trees is reaching the edges of Jo's hearing. When Gabe swaggers into view, his arms are filled past capacity with packages of graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows. A flashlight dangles tenuously from the fingers of one hand until Sam snatches it away and tucks it into a pocket. Gabe tosses him a grateful smile. "It's not a camping trip without s'mores," he declares as he sinks to the ground, spreading his cargo out before the fire like an offering. "And since we're popping Cassie's camping cherry with this little expedition… well, we gotta do it proper."

Nobody is fooled. "You just wanted sugar," three of them chorus.

Castiel just blinks warily at the surrounding trees. "I'm not sure if I want to eat anything cooked on a stick," he admits quietly.

"It's not a stick; it'll be a filthy, insect-riddled, half-rotted limb from some tree that'll probably cause an allergic reaction on the walls of your stomach."

"Shut up, Balth." Dean bounds to his feet, blanket slipping from his shoulders, and pulls Cas up after him. "S'mores are the backwoods equivalent of pie. Toss me that flashlight, Sammy? C'mon, let's go find some good branches. And slap him for me, will you, Jo?" Flicking on the beam to shine yellow light across the campsite, he takes Cas' hand and starts off into the underbrush.

Huffing in amusement, Balthazar suffers Jo's elbow to the ribcage with good cheer, then twists ninety degrees to the right to harass Gabriel. "You could have at least been courteous enough to pack along some Toblerone for the civilized among us."

"Growing up on a boat that sailed around Europe because your parents wanted to get away from your fucked-up family does not makes you civilized," Jo informs him. "It makes you a smartass with a hodgepodge accent."

Balthazar spends a moment looking torn between righteous indignation and sheer cockiness, but then Sam intervenes: "You're living with a bartender from Texas, dude. Think on that before you keep talking." He gives Jo a small smile. "No offense."

She shrugs. "None taken." Slapping Balthazar lightly on the arm, she clambers upright. "Get off your ass and find a stick; you're not using mine."

"I don't –"

"Want our uncivilized American food, yeah, yeah. That's what you said before we took you to the Carnegie Deli, too – argue your point in ten minutes when you're trying to steal everything I eat." She nudges his thigh with one foot. "Get that pretty ass of yours up and moving."

With a long-suffering sigh, Balthazar heaves himself off the ground, plucking the proffered flashlight from Jo's fingers. When she grins, he gives her a flat stare for all of a second before cracking into a smile. "Alright, you devilish young firecracker. Let's go find some passable… sticks." His eyebrows twitch suggestively, and Jo snorts at the sight.

In the background, Gabriel sighs. "See, _they're_ gonna go fuck each other up against some tree – why can't we ever…" He trails away under the force of Sam's bitchface. "Whatever. We're not waiting up for you two."

Jo tunes them out, threading her fingers through Balthazar's and heading for the trees, eyes on the flashlight-lit ground. The forest grows thickly in this corner of Texas, so it's not long before the firelight is filtered out to nothing.

Sound waves still carry through, though. Behind her, there's a minor scuffle, interrupted a yelp of "watch the marshmallows!" and then Sam's soft, pleased laugh. Balthazar's already backing her up against a tree, soft hands cradling her face and brushing back her hair, softer mouth pressed against hers, when Sam's voice booms through the branches: "_Don't forget to use protection!_"

"Intrusive bastards," Balthazar growls.

Jo just laughs. Locking both hands around the back of his neck, she pulls him down again, because he's warm, because he _is _soft and careful when he lets one arm drop to palm the jut of her hip, and because, not so very far away, behind another tree, she can hear Dean and Cas doing the exact same thing.

…

Sometime back in the dawn-misted days of her youth, Jo learned the fine art of roasting marshmallows. She settled upon her preferred method years ago: hovering just over the flames until one half is a light golden brown, then rolling the stick and dipping it down to set the untouched side of the marshmallow alight, before whipping it back up to blow it out. It's what she's been doing all night.

Now, as she watches the various cooking methods of her fellow campers, she tries to decide if there's a correlation between someone's personality and how they prefer their s'mores. Dean, for example, likes to all but drop his stick into the flames; the entire marshmallow has to be blazing merrily before he pulls it out. Contrastingly, Gabriel barely lets his warm up before snapping it back to grab for the graham crackers and chocolate. An inexperienced Castiel ends up setting fire to most of his, then frantically snuffing them out. Sam is the most methodical by far; he lets his slowly roast, rolling the branch between his palms to keep the heat even, until the whole marshmallow is a glorious, crispy umber. Even Balthazar, for all his pomp and posturing, _has _been camping before – though not for more than twenty years. As he is oh-so-fond of saying, however, age really is just a number, and he takes more interest in turning his marshmallows into miniature torches than in actually eating anything.

Every time Jo scolds him, he responds by beaming and pressing a kiss into her hairline. It's a cycle that repeats every few minutes, as their expedition works their way through two bags of jumbo marshmallows, before Balthazar decides he's had enough and lays his (now-rather-charred) stick to the side in favor of wrapping an arm around Jo's shoulders to tuck her against his body.

"Grabby bastard," she calls him.

He hums cheerfully and says nothing.

"Grabby _old _bastard."

It's Gabriel who replies: "_Ouch_ – watch your company before you say shit like that."

Beside him, Sam is grinning. He winks at her. "I called him that just last week. Works wonders."

"Yeah, 'cause it's mean! I'm offended. Truly, truly." Gabriel lays one hand over his heart, pulling a wounded expression onto his face. "I don't know why I waste my time with such derisive, disrespectful ignoramuses." He sniffs haughtily. Laughing long and loud, Sam loops an arm around him and drops his chin for a kiss. When Gabe shakes his head and tugs away, still feigning resentment, the firelight glints off the gray strands threaded through his hair. He watches Sam pout for a moment, then relents, slipping back into the circle of his arms.

"Pussy," Dean snorts.

"Hypocrite," Gabriel fires back without taking his eyes off Sam.

He has a point though. Drowsy with beer, jetlag, and too many s'mores, Castiel is stretched out on the ground, head pillowed in his husband's lap, eyes closed. The corners of his mouth twitch upwards at the retaliation. When Dean starts to withdraw his hands from where they'd been carding through Cas' hair, one arm reaches up and back, fingers lax, to loosely encircle Dean's wrist. Just like that, Dean softens, resuming his ministrations, though he does fire off a warning glare at his brother's smirk.

It's not Sam who needs worrying about; Balthazar's the one to chuckle and say "getting soft in your old age, Winchester," then recoil with a yelp when an unidentified thrown object thunks against his skull. "I was taking your side, you…" He trails away in dismay.

Jo doesn't understand until she sees Gabriel – now minus one hiking boot – grinning smugly in their direction. "I'm the oldest person here, you ass." His gaze shifts to focus on Jo. "You need to teach your infant over there some manners."

"I've tried." She heaves an exaggerated sigh, then grins down at Balthazar. "You get stuck down there, Balth?"

Balthazar doesn't even bother getting miffed at the jab; rubbing his head, he lobs the boot back at Gabriel – Sam snatches it out of the air and tucks it away somewhere – and sits up. "Better me insulting you than Michael" is his only grumbled defense.

There's a collective groan around the campfire.

"Dude," Dean says. "Top of the _List of Banned Topics_: your family." Everyone murmurs in agreement.

To be honest, Jo has never met most of the Shurley family; something tells her she wants to keep it that way. Her experience is limited to Balthazar, Cas, Gabe, and Anna – the distant cousin who always drops in a few times a year to harrage Balthazar for no particular reason.

There's Lucifer, too, though they've only met a handful of times – when he and Gabriel ducked out of their family's Thanksgiving dinner early, years and years ago, to spend a week knocking around the city instead. Then he came East again for a fortnight to preside over Dean and Cas' wedding (Jo watched him dancing with her mother, and she'd never known Ellen could waltz, but there she was, sweeping across the floor, looking Lucifer right in the eye the whole time like "_do you really think I'm just going to let you lead?_"). He's come around once or twice more in the intervening years for less significant events too.

In any event, all the Shurleys she knows are nice enough – "nice" being a rather loose term when applied to Gabriel, and Anna, Balthazar, and Lucifer all operate with near-lethal levels of cynicism, but after a decade in New York City, it's nothing Jo can't handle.

But she's certainly heard some tales about the rest of the family.

Chuck Shurley: the patriarch, head of one of America's largest insurance companies and a personification of Antarctica after his wife died mysteriously while Gabriel was just a toddler, nigh on fifty years ago. Michael: the prince, the neurosurgeon who lives in L.A., the miserable excuse for an eldest brother. Raphael: almost as bad as Michael, just younger, with all the swagger of an attorney who's gone just a bit too long without losing a case. Zachariah, Uriel, Virgil… the list goes on. It's a network of cousins and siblings and step-children that fans out across the country and the planet, bearing Chuck's power to the furthest corners of the globe.

Jo knows that Balthazar's parents eloped to Europe at the first opportunity, and that Gabriel more or less stood in for Cas', who were too preoccupied with protesting gay rights to raise their son. She knows that Dean has met Michael exactly once in his life and will only speak of the incident to call it "an experience that I'd eat a steaming bucked of shit not to repeat." She knows that Lucifer went to the University of Washington specifically because it was as far as he could get from both his father and Michael without leaving the country. She knows that Anna was the only non-NYC Shurley besides Lucifer to come to Dean and Cas' wedding, even though Chuck spends half the year in the Hamptons. And she knows that if she ever had to meet any of these family members that she's heard so much about, her gut reaction would probably be to punch most of them in the face.

Wrapping an arm around Balthazar's waist, resting her head against the line of his jaw, she steals one of his favorite insults to say "They're all bloody bastards, and they're not here. Fuck 'em."

"I'll toast to that – so long as you didn't mean it literally." Gabriel spares a moment to wrinkle his nose in mock-disgust, then tilts his beer in her direction anyway. "I always knew there was a reason I liked you."

"I set you up with Sam, dipshit."

While Dean howls with laughter, Gabe gives her a narrow-eyed, calculating look… then gives it up for lost and takes a swig of beer. "Whatever," he mutters.

Sam snorts, before taking the bottle right out of his hands. He too gives Jo a silent toast, then swallows down the rest of the alcohol in a single gulp. Gabriel whacks him in the stomach for his trouble. Sam ignores the strike as he would a fly and leans back against a conveniently-placed log instead, folding his arms across his chest and letting his eyes drop shut, patting the ground next to him. After a moment of silent consideration, Gabe flops down in the indicated spot, head on Sam's shoulder, and flips Dean the bird when he snickers.

For his own part, Dean now has a totally-asleep Cas in his lap, but doesn't seem to mind, even though his legs have got to be killing him by now. He just keeps on stroking his fingers through Castiel's hair, eyes on the fire almost before he's done mocking Gabriel, and it's not long before a contemplative screen slides over them, blocking out the rest of the world.

He could sit there all night and be perfectly happy, Jo realizes. He's got food in his belly, his husband in his arms (or near enough), and friends all around. Dean Winchester is perfectly content with his life right now.

Jo doesn't know if she can say the same about herself – she's never been able to block out the whole world for more than maybe an hour at a time. Thoughts of Michael and Cas' parents and all the faces she'd like to break niggle at her mind, but then Balthazar turns his face just enough to kiss her hair, and those thoughts are brushed away with her involuntary smile. "Yes?"

"Hm? Oh, nothing." Sighing, Balthazar waves one hand pointlessly in the air, then lets it drop. "Just, you know…"

"Glad I came along after all?"

He chuckles at that. "My dear Ms. Harvelle, I'm always glad when you're with me." His arm settles more securely around her shoulders. "Always."

Jo doesn't know why that makes her feel like a giddy schoolgirl, but it does. She hums under her breath and stretches her feet towards the fire. A delicious warmth tickles at her toes and heart, so wonderful that she can ignore the bumpy ground and just let her eyes close, head nestling into the crook of Balthazar's neck.

He huffs gently, but makes no move to disturb her. He doesn't even say anything. The arm around her shoulders flexes, curling her inward so she doesn't have to twist her neck so much, and he presses one last kiss to her forehead as the heat spreads over her entire ribcage, and this tiny clearing in Texas feels that extra bit like home.


End file.
